Sammendrag
This paper explores the role of labour demand in shaping the temporal outcome of labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe to Norway. We argue that within demand based migration regimes – such as EU free movement – material conditions of production, and thus the types and durability of employment that migrants are able to access, are crucial for determining temporal outcomes of migration. First, we provide in-depth qualitative descriptions of dynamics of labour demand within major immigrant labour markets in Norway, based on interviews with employers, workers and mid-level managers within construction, hotel and fish processing. Fish-processing represents a well-suited natural experiment, as wild-caught whitefish and farmed redfish gives rise to highly different temporal dynamics of demand, despite otherwise similar conditions of work. Based on these descriptions, we predict that migrants will demonstrate different patterns of return and settlement depending on sector of employment. We test our hypothesis using data from the Norwegian tax-register. By sampling all migrants who arrived a given year, we identify how many of them are settled in Norway and how many have returned home after a fixed time period. We argue that the “liquid migration” perspective indeed has merits, but that the significance of material conditions of production and dynamics of labour demand is overlooked in current debates about free movement in Europe.
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